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[Thrillho]

I'm making this post because I want to see people's reactions. I enjoy a good debate, me.

So one thing that English folks have been saying for years - and Americans too for that matter (or to fit in with my other thread... United Statesians) - is that American TV is dumb, lowest-common denominator shit with laugh tracks at parts that aren't funny.

The thing being, English comedy can't really stand up to American comedy for precisely one reason - season lengths.

Seasons - or series in this country - tend to average 6 or 7 episodes in the UK. In the US, comedy show series tend to be 19 to 25 episodes each year.

If we were to use just The Simpsons as an example - most people tend to agree that Simpsons got properly good at season 2 and I'm going to arbitrarily select season 8 as the last properly good one (which honestly I think is true).

Even conservatively estimating the season lengths at 22 episodes apiece (and I've got the box sets so I know they're more often over than under) we're talking about 154 episodes of brilliant comedy.

Now let's measure that up against British comedy. To get 154 episodes' worth of great British comedy, you would need to use:
All of The Young Ones (12)
All of Blackadder (27 including specials)
All of Fawlty Towers (12)
All of Father Ted (25)
All of The Office (13)
All of The IT Crowd (24)
All of Brass Eye (7)
All of The Day Today (6)
All of The Thick Of It (23)
All of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace (6)
= 155

And that's only up against The Simpsons alone.

And the thing is, it's not just about quantity. The Simpsons was rock-solid for something like 95% of the episodes during that period, which is a phenomenal run of great writing even taking into account writer changes, because at the time the characters could cope.

Some people like to play the 'quality over quantity' argument here, but you can't tell me for a second that The Office's 13 episodes are good enough on their own to outstrip 7 consecutive years churning out 22 great episodes per year of Simpsons.

Therefore: American comedy is better than British comedy because even if it isn't as good as some of the British shows, it's nearly as good and there is way, WAY more of it. So even if there are way more shitty American shows than good American shows, America only needs to have a handful of great shows to just outstrip British comedy altogether.

American comedy > British comedy.

DISCUSS

[TheEvilDog]

I would much rather have quality over quantity, every single time.

The reason why the likes of the BBC can't produce seasons the length of American counterparts is because of the way they are funded. American networks are paid through advertisements, whereas the BBC is forbidden by the government to make any money from advertising. Instead, its funding comes from annual television license fees collected from around the UK. This results in the BBC having a much lower budget that American networks. So to maximise the money, there is often just one or two writers for shows and limited to so many episodes, compared to whole teams (I believe that the Simpsons currently have 16 writers on their production team).

Why is this better? One writer working on six scripts is going to be far more consistent than 16 people on 22 episodes. One writer isn't going to be under a huge amount of pressure to get a series written. And a shorter series means that there isn't any dragging out the series just to satisfy the network executives. Which leads to my second point.

There is an old rule of comedy, know when to end the joke. Take a look at the likes of the Office. Ricky Gervais said he wanted to do just two series of that show because otherwise he would hate to do any more. Not that he hated the character, but simply it would stop being funny after a while and would lose its appeal as an "iconic show". Compare this to Friends, where I'm sure many people would say that the show started going downhill once Monica and Chandler were married and most likely ran for two series too long.

It comes down to whether or not the last episode is as funny as the first? Has it become stale? Has someone been overworked? Or has it gotten to the point where you know what type of comment a character is going to make even if it is a new episode?

When a show becomes formulaic, it becomes stale. English comedies don't do that, it tells the joke and leaves while people are still laughing, unlike American comedies which tells the same jokes again and again.

[BeoPuppy]

There is so much utter shit being produced, packaged as comedy, that I prefer the less is more approach. Seriously .. everything in eternal rerun is just so, so bad. Everybody loves Raymond. King of Queens.  Full House, Family Ties, Who's the Boss? and Growing Pains. Roseanne, Married with Children. Seinfeld. Home Improvement, Mad About You, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Frasier, Will & Grace, Roseanne, Family Matters, Friends, Harry and the Hendersons, Unhappily Ever After, Mike & Molly, Rules of Engagement, $h*! My Dad Says, Life with Bonnie, According to Jim, The New Adventures of Old Christine ...

... please america ... stop trying to be funny ...

[Pilchard123]

Instead, [the BBC's] funding comes from a legalized protection racket.

"Oh, look at us, we're independent of any government influence!"
...
"We can't man up and deal with adverts! Please send your bully boys around to threaten people into paying for stuff they don't want..."

I wouldn't mind if you only needed a license for BBC programs, like a subscription. It doesn't matter if you only watch non-BBC stuff, you must have a license unless you only watch web-broadcast programs. Seriously, if there aren't enough people paying to watch your stuff out of choice, you're doing it wrong.

[ackblom12]

I think comparing them in this manner is an utterly futile and counter productive exercise.

Buuuut, I'd say it depends on what you look for in your comedy. The US networks and the BBC both excel at comedy (sometimes) but they tend to be good at very different kinds of comedy. For example, the US just doesn't really have much of a handle on absurdest comedy like the BBC does. If you want dark comedy, while the US has it it will never match up to the BBC's capability of hitting the darkest of the dark. The US seems to do a much better job with pop culture humor in general and is generally better at day to day life humor, IMO. Sitcom humor is one that the US has mastered to a ridiculous degree, despite having so many bad ones.

So yeah, they're both great depending on the style of humor you wish to have.

[Thrillho]

Instead, [the BBC's] funding comes from a legalized protection racket.

"Oh, look at us, we're independent of any government influence!"
...
"We can't man up and deal with adverts! Please send your bully boys around to threaten people into paying for stuff they don't want..."

I wouldn't mind if you only needed a license for BBC programs, like a subscription. It doesn't matter if you only watch non-BBC stuff, you must have a license unless you only watch web-broadcast programs. Seriously, if there aren't enough people paying to watch your stuff out of choice, you're doing it wrong.

License funding actually does go to other channels, not just the BBC, it just isn't as widely known.

[pwhodges]

It is indeed required by law to purchase a licence in order to use a TV set to receive broadcasts over the air from any station. However, the collected fees (minus the cost of collection) go to the BBC alone.  Some parts of the BBC receive other funding - the World Service from the Foreign Office, though that's about to end - and the Worldwide TV services are fully commercial.

[Carl-E]

...
Roseanne,
...
Roseanne,
...
Roseanne,
...

Ok, you only had it in there twice.  But really, it was (and still is) one of my wife's and my favorite shows.  Probably because we were married and raising a couple of kids when it was new, and could identify.  That, and the general snarky senses of humor we both inherited. 

But some things can't be replicated - there's an early episode about a trip to a mall, my favorite.  Lots of good one-liners, but the one that had me doubled up was, when asked where he parked, Dan says "Gdansk". 

But bear in mind I'd spent the day working at the radio station hearing about Polish elections and Lech Walensa, then trying to park in our building's parking lot.  So it just tickled me.  Reruns can't hit that.  I'll always laugh at that line, but my kids just say, "what?"


Then I have to explain the joke...

[ackblom12]

I really think one of Roseanne's big successes is in how well they portrayed a poor Working Home. Practically every other sitcom in existence in the US centers around the financially successful, or at least the "we're going to skip over finances entirely until it's convenient for comedic timing" type of family/person.

[Lupercal]

I'm a Brit and I find Fraiser pretty consistently hilarious. Friends - well, I'm re-watching that out of sheer boredom and yes, got to Season 8 and it has really dropped off.

Conversely, I ended up watching Two and a Half Men a while ago and wondering what the actual fuck that programme was about. Why was it ever considered funny?

A lot of the time I think that 90s American sitcoms tend to be quite funny, or at least more identifiable to me than a lot of current stuff. I don't know why, because ackblom hit the nail on the head - I often wonder why you never really see people in sitcoms struggling with money, and if you do, its only for a few episodes until they get a great new job somewhere.

On the other hand, for us Brits there's always been a Baldrick around somewhere...

[Barmymoo]

I find British comedy funnier than American comedy, on the whole, although I do laugh at plenty of American shows. But given the choice, I'd go for British humour every time.

Slightly tangentially, I think the BBC does drama about the best of anywhere I've ever seen. I'm a big fan of some ITV shows (ok, two of them) but the BBC is fairly consistently good at producing quality drama. Yes, the series are short. But they are excellent.

[ackblom12]

Oh also, laugh tracks need to be burned in a goddamn ditch.

[dps]

It's probably a bit hard to really judge this for the vast majority of us.  While this is changing, due to the internet, in general, f you're in the US, you only get to see the successful British shows;  if you're in the UK, you only get to see the successful American shows.  And in both cases, "successful" isn't necessarily the same as "best" or even "good".

[Lupercal]

Pssh, I'm pretty sure I've (unfortunately) seen episodes of Joey and 2 Broke Girls airing here.

May, have to agree about drama. Sherlock was particularly well done, although isn't there another series of that coming out in the US called Elementary or Watson or something? Won't be as good, I can promise you that!

I tend to think the cleverer American dramas just get cancelled anyway.

[Carl-E]

Elementary, and it's really quite good.  I've only seen a couple of episodes, but I enjoyed them thoroughly - the characterizations were very well done. 

However, I've not seen Sherlock, so I really can't compare.  Which is no help, I know.